Remembering Joanna Macy as she prepares to leave us
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2025-07-16
Remembering Joanna Macy as she prepares to leave us
by Ken Homer
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
I first met Joanna Macy in 1992 at a Buddhist Peace Fellowship retreat. There were about 80 of us gathered at a retreat center just outside of Oakland. It was mid-afternoon and everyone was in that post-lunch-blood-sugar-crash-don’t-make-me-think-lull. We were standing around in a circle yawning when Joanna said, “Oh dear, we need to shift the energy here and wake ourselves up!”
So, she had us create “a storm.” She started by imitating the sound of the wind and told people to make that sound as she pointed at them and her arm swept slowly around the entire circle. We each vocalized when she pointed to us and the wind that began as a sigh soon built in volume, pitch, and intensity. She added different sounds for rain, thunder, and chaos, and each new sound she introduced overtook the previous one as it moved among us. She had us snapping our fingers, clapping our hands, and stomping our feet. Soon there was a raging storm of sound and a lot of smiling faces. We were now awake!
I needed to use the restroom and when I returned, I discovered that everyone had paired up with a partner for a “parent-child” walk, where the person role-playing the parent would lead the person role-playing the child around the property. The instruction was for the child to react to whatever the parent was showing them as if they were experiencing it for the very first time. Besides me, the only person without a partner was Joanna so she became my child and I hers for about 20 minutes in each role. I still recall clearly how this woman, who was nearly 30 years my senior, was able to connect with childlike wonder and essentially become, for a moment, a child once more. I brought her over to a jasmine bush and she inhaled deeply and smiled so broadly that I had no trouble discerning what she must’ve looked like when she was but a wee lass. This was the first but not the last time that I would witness her graceful fluidity in assuming different aspects and perspectives on life.
Over the next few years, we would run into each other often at BFP events. She was on the faculty at a program called Deep Ecology Summer School, a two week-long retreat in the redwoods in NorCal, which I attended in the summers of ’93 and ’94. It was there that I, along with dozens of others, participated in many of her marvelously constructed processes for connecting deeply with the land, the life it supports, and ancestors both past and future. During the years we were in regular contact I had many long talks with her about the Dharma, dependent co-arising, systems thinking, deep ecology, the growing threat to our home world, approaches to healing, and life in general. We fell out of touch in the 2000s but her influence on me continues to this day.
Few and far between are the people I’ve met who are of her caliber. People who have such a tremendous grasp of the way life works along with the imagination, creativity, and talent to connect people in profound ways, to awaken them to what is important in life. Joanna shaped my thinking in ways that were both deep and broad. I cherish the times I spent with her, and with Fran, her husband, who was a formidable intellect and a hell of a nice guy.
Fran left this world in 2009, and it seems Joanna will join him shortly. The world is a better place for the both of them having the courage to do their part in supporting the narrow bridge of life that connects the dead to the unborn.
Joanna, you have my deepest thanks for the ways in which you made me a better person. Wishing you a peaceful transition to the next world.
With love from an old student of yours,
Ken
Related: